Zirtual Blog

Here at Zirtual, we believe in helping people advance their businesses, live better lives and work more efficiently by providing the highest caliber virtual assistants. Imagine you've screened thousands of college-educated and highly trained assistants and prepared them for this very job — and you only had to pick one. Well, here at Zirtual — we do that for you.

Not so long ago, the word “outsourcing” had a bad rap as being synonymous with lost local jobs and greedy CEOs looking for dirt cheap labor. Today, however, busy entrepreneurs and companies everywhere are considering the advantages of virtual outsourcing.

Working with virtual assistants has become increasingly popular over the past several years, as small business owners, entrepreneurs, and busy people everywhere have acknowledged the need for additional help but wanted to avoid the cost and hassle of hiring in-house.

One of those sacrifices that has to be made is surrendering your ability to do it all (that is, all aspects of your business) by yourself. Tim Ferriss summed it up well when he said, “Focus on being PRODUCTIVE, instead of simply BUSY.”

Productive founders know that in order to scale their businesses, they need to be able to get out of the daily details, and into big picture thinking. But in order to do that, they have to outsource.

From Virtual Assistants, to freelance support, to hiring an expert to handle specific tasks, outsourcing means less hours spent tearing out your hair over tedious tasks, and more time pushing your company forward into the future.

You can do that, too. To help get the ideas rolling, we spoke with nine different founders to see what tasks they’ve outsourced and how it helped their companies.

For busy startup teams, the name of the game —- today more than ever — is productivity.

FitStars CEO and co-founder Mike Maser sums it up perfectly: “When you're building a vision, a team and a product all at once, time is your ultimate currency. Every day presents both the opportunity to break ground and the risk of losing ground. At the end of the day I'd trade anything for an extra hour to ensure we've taken a step forward.”

And when you’re a startup, working at the breakneck speed of startups, it’s only natural that things start falling through the cracks. Social media gets neglected, correspondence goes unresponded-to. Every startup has a laundry list of items they should be doing but aren’t — or things they are doing, but could be doing a lot better.

And there’s a very simple reason for that: startup teams are not an unlimited resource.

There are only so many hours in the day, so many people on your team, so much energy and focus that each of those team members has to put toward getting your company where it needs to go. And, of course, there’s that other, classic startup limitation: the bank account. Whereas larger, more established companies might run into a problem and throw money at it, startups have to be a lot more strategic when it comes to when and how they’re spending their money.

So you’re a startup. You’re rich in ideas, but you’re poor in resources with which to actually make those ideas happen.And no matter how much you multitask, delegate and prioritize, chances are you and your team are still facing Sophie’s Choice-style decisions about where to focus your energies—and what to leave by the wayside.

And, if you’re like 99.99% of startup teams out there, that stuff you leave by the wayside drives you nuts.

That feeling—the feeling of working ceaselessly and yet somehow stillnot making the progress you want to be making, still watching opportunities slip through your fingers and important tasks fall through the cracks—that’s the feeling that’s telling you that it’s time to get a virtual assistant.

Virtual assistants are a great way to add some additional, high-quality bandwidth to your team—without breaking the bank.A good virtual assistant does more than buy your groceries or manage your calendar: they become a seamless member of your team and help drive your company toward its goals. Virtual assistants keep you organized, they keep you focused, they keep you sane. But most importantly: virtual assistants free up your time and your team’s time to work on those truly important projects that are going to make a difference for your company.

“Like every other team member, our VA plays a specific role in our efforts and remains an important piece of the puzzle.”

An increasing number of startups are using virtual assistants as a secret weapon to propel their company toward its goals. But while plenty of attention has been paid to the ways that virtual assistants can help busy professionals in their personal lives, there’s been a lot less discussion of how startups can use virtual assistants to drive actual resultsfor their company.

In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at how virtual assistants can become virtual team members, and move the needle for startups in real, actionable ways.